The release cycle for v0.14 ended up being quite long for a variety of reasons, and though I accomplished most of my goals for the release (adding git support, improving the nautilus extension), there is always more to do, more functionality to add and more bugs to fix.

Our next release

Since I started working on this project (2+ years now), there has been a subtle pattern to our releases. v0.12 was a complete rewrite of the original framework along with a bunch of new functionality, and v0.13 added onto it, filling out the functionality and fixing bugs. v0.14 was similar to v0.12 in that it pushed some boundaries by adding git support, and I think v0.15 should continue the pattern by filling out the existing functionality and not doing anything too ambitious. I originally had planned on adding support for another VCS in v0.15, but instead it will be used as a stepping stone for v0.16.

With that said, here is roughly what I’d like to accomplish for v0.15 (subject to changes of course):

Add a recursive/asynchronous status monitor to the Nautilus extension

Add RabbitVCS menu items and emblems to the Gedit file browser plugin

Convert all dialogs from glade to gtkbuilder

Refactor VCS abstraction code to make it easier to add new VCSs and UIs

These may or may not get done for v0.15 but these are goals.

Looking for contributors

While I will continue working on RabbitVCS for the forseeable future, and I do get occasional help from Jason and Juan, it would be great if more people would contribute to the project, even if in small ways. If you know python and can spare some time, check out our issue tracker and see if you can fix a bug or implement a feature request. If you don’t know python but you know some other language, maybe you can work on a new client, like a Windows shell extension, a Mac Finder extension, a KDE extension, or a standalone application for accessing RabbitVCS functionality. Or if you don’t want to do any programming, you can help keep the website/documentation up to date, manage our translations, or triage bug reports. You can go as big or as little as you want with your contributions. I look forward to hearing from you!

It looks like something strange happened with the v0.14.1 release tarball because it did not include the actual bug fixes, it was an exact copy of v0.14. So none of the bugs I fixed were actually fixed in that release. With that said, here is the “real” v0.14.1, but I’m calling it v0.14.1.1 so we know the difference. I included a couple more bug fixes in this release, as well.

(Bug #456) Fix nautilus crasher when dialogs are acted on

(Bug #461) Fix a crasher in the merge dialog

(Bug #457) In the changes dialog, fix bug that stopped diffs from being generated

Also fixed an issue where opening versioned files from the changes dialog would not work sometimes.

A few serious bugs were discovered shortly after the v0.14 release, including one very serious one that crashed nautilus when any kind of dialog was displayed or program was executed. So here is a small bugfix release that fixes these issues.

(Bug #456) Fix nautilus crasher when dialogs are acted on

(Bug #461) Fix a crasher in the merge dialog

(Bug #457) In the changes dialog, fix bug that stopped diffs from being generated

Also fixed an issue where opening versioned files from the changes dialog would not work sometimes.

After almost a year of development (with some breaks), v0.14 is finally here. This release brings about a ton of new functionality and bug fixes, most notably the addition of git support, which makes this our first release that is truly multi-vcs, a quicker status checker for the nautilus file manager extension, and an improved mechanism for resolving and editing conflicts.